Effective computer security strategies integrate network security monitoring: the collection and analysis of data to help a network administrator detect and respond to intrusions. Accordingly, network security and maintenance are not simply about building impenetrable firewalls. Determined attackers will eventually overcome traditional defenses.
The ability to capture and analyze network behavior for incident detection is becoming increasingly challenging. Incident detection is particularly challenging for network and security administrators in which the network is capable of transmitting Ethernet frames or packets at a rate of ten gigabits per second (10 GbE) or higher. Incident detection is also challenging where a network includes a virtual, hybrid, or cloud architecture.
A data center computer network, including a plurality of servers, may support load balancing of the number of clients or the performance of certain functions among multiple servers. For example, if the number of clients on a server begin using substantial processor resources, clients may be moved to another server for client server interaction to load balance the clients across servers. If a functional process is particularly time consuming, one server may be dedicated to that functional process. If a client requests that function from another server, the functional process may be offloaded to that dedicated server for processing in order to load balance the workload across servers in the data center computer network.
The traditional methods of load balancing of clients and functional processes in a data center across multiple servers to support clients are not applicable when analyzing Ethernet packets within the data center computer network.